


Crash

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Brothers, Concussions, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Head Injury, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 01, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 09:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16658567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Missing scene for 1x13. Ward is barely holding it together, but after Harold's funeral (such as it is), things just all kind of ... hit.





	Crash

**Author's Note:**

> For my h/c bingo "PTSD" square.

After the police are finally done with him (and at this point Ward can't even remember what lies he's told them; he's mostly ended up explaining his incoherent story by way of exhaustion and confusion, which happens to be at least somewhat true) the hospital insists on keeping him in the ER for a few hours for observation. It's awful: the lights are too bright and the noises too loud, leaving him even more miserable and sick than he already is, and he feels like he's teetering on the edge of an emotional disaster that he really, really doesn't want to have with an audience.

He finally escapes by lying to the duty nurse about having someone to take him home and gets a cab back to his enormous, empty apartment. Here, the emotional disaster he's expecting doesn't happen; he just collapses on the couch as soon as he walks through the door, like he doesn't even have the energy for a proper breakdown right now. The other thing that doesn't happen, that he fully expects to happen, is that he doesn't get completely wasted, although the main reason for this (he suspects) is that he feels too shitty to get off the couch.

So, effectively, he lies on the couch for 24-plus hours staring at the wall and feeling like shit, and occasionally stirring himself enough to reach for his phone and field a few of the approximately 50 billion texts, voicemails, and emails that have been coming in from everywhere -- from Rand, from the media, from the cops -- ever since his dad took a clipful of bullets and a header off the top of the Rand building into a busy Manhattan thoroughfare. He works in small bursts because he can't focus on anything for more than a couple of minutes without his head feeling like it's about to explode out through his eyes.

Ward doesn't have a lot to be grateful for right now, or happy about, but he _is_ glad of Megan. In a series of terse texts, he gives her the barest bones of the situation: his dad's dead, he's in the hospital (okay, stretching the truth, but he's gambling that it'll get him out of having to explain any further) and he needs her to handle things and deflect publicity until he's back on his feet.

He also asks her to schedule his dad's cremation for the next day, telling her to pull whatever strings it takes to make that happen.

And then he mostly just lays there and tries not to think about things (thinking hurts anyway), occasionally texting Joy and getting no reply, until it's time to pry himself off the couch, try to scrape together some semblance of a well-put-together businessman out of the hollow-eyed human wreckage in the mirror, and try not to pass out or throw up while he attends his dad's funeral. The idea of just letting it happen without him is strongly tempting, but he needs to be there. For closure. To make sure Harold doesn't just walk away. And because, in spite of everything, Harold is his father, and apparently just about the only family he has now that Joy has left him.

*

Or so he thinks, until he finds Danny waiting for him at the funeral home, dressed in a sober black suit that even manages not to be wildly inappropriate for the occasion.

*

He can't quite figure out _why_ having Danny there makes it feel so much less awful. It's just ... he thought he was going to have to do this alone. (That he's going to do everything alone from now on, with his dad gone, with Joy gone.) And then Danny's there, and ... it's not like anything could make this day _good_ , but even through the blinding headache and the knot of conflicted emotions surging against his tenuous self-control, he's aware of a feeling that's like missing a step at the top of a long flight of stairs and starting to fall and then having someone else's hands catch him.

He's never had anyone catch him before.

But having Danny here also means working overtime playing "normal" -- not that he hasn't had plenty of experience at it, between his dad's abuse and having every kind of hangover known to man, but he's running on the ragged edge and from the way Danny keeps looking at him, he's not sure how much of a front he's managing to put up. 

"You okay?" Danny says, as the flames swallow his dad's coffin along with his dad, and Ward tries not to think about Harold coming back to life at that exact moment, thrashing around in the fire ...

"What do you think?" he says. Danny shuts up, and Ward feels ... guilty. Or something. Danny doesn't have to be here. They were never really even friends as kids. They don't owe each other anything. But Danny _is_ here, and he still doesn't know how to deal with it. He doesn't know how to be indebted to someone, in a way that he doesn't know how to repay. 

But at least it's over quickly. There are some forms to scribble on, blurring in front of his eyes, and then he's walking out of the funeral home into sunlight that kicks him in the face even as thin and wintry as it is. Danny's hanging back a little, having some kind of conversation with Hogarth. Ward fumbles in his pocket for his sunglasses and pushes them on with a shaking hand. It feels like there are screws drilling into his temples, and he keeps seeing his dad's coffin in the fire. Keeps seeing his dad going over the side of the building ... his dad, in a hospital bed, emaciated from cancer ... his dad's blood all over his hands ...

Putting on the sunglasses makes it look like everything is going dark, telescoping around him as grayness closes in from the sides. 

Or ... maybe it's actually doing that. The waves of dizziness that were lapping over him back in the funeral home are suddenly more like a tidal wave, and the sidewalk tilts under him, and he reaches out to catch himself but there's nothing near enough to grab hold of --

\-- except for Danny, who's suddenly grabbing onto him. And saying something, but Ward can't make it out through the ringing in his ears.

Dimly he's aware that he's sitting down on the winter-cold pavement and Danny is crouching beside him, one hand fisted in Ward's coat. Danny is saying his name and he sounds genuinely worried, which probably means Ward looks like absolute hell.

"I'm fine," he says carefully, through stiff lips. He's not planning to get sick here. And anyway, there's nothing in his stomach to get sick _with._

"No, you're not." Danny reaches out, and Ward flinches back, but before he can really do anything about it, Danny is fingering his head at the base of his skull, running fingers lightly over Ward's blood-stiff hair at the nape of his neck. He didn't bother taking a shower this morning -- hasn't had one since everything that happened on the rooftop (to be honest, he wasn't sure if he could manage not to pass out under the hot water) -- so all he did was grease his hair viciously into place, douse himself in body spray, and put on a clean suit.

He can see this realization dawning on Danny. "Ward, have you, like ... slept? Or eaten anything?"

"I slept," Ward says. Passing out counts, right? He tries to remember the last time he ate anything. However long it's been, he's not really hungry. Going through drug withdrawal twice in a row and then getting concussed plays hell with the metabolism.

"I'm calling you a cab," Danny says decisively, which, okay, he was planning on doing that anyway, and he doesn't really mind Danny doing it for him. This lasts up until he realizes that Danny plans on getting in _with him._

"Where do you think you're going?" Ward demands, with all the vehemence he can muster after having been manhandled, by Danny, into the backseat of the taxi. Crumpled against the door, he tries to glare at Danny, who's getting in beside him, but the sunglasses probably detract from the effect.

"I'm taking you home," Danny says, and gives the cab driver Ward's address, which is the first time Ward realizes Danny even knows where his apartment is.

Ward shuts his eyes; he's too tired and feels too shitty to argue.

He might have actually slept, or something like it, because the next thing he knows, Danny's manhandling him back out and paying the driver. By the time that's done, Ward has managed to get himself back together: he's capable of standing on his own, and he can get himself upstairs, _thank you very much._

But the cab is still leaving without Danny, who shadows him inside but at least has the decency not to try to grab at him again, even when Ward has to try several times to punch in his security code.

"Why are you staying?" he asks in the elevator.

"I don't know," Danny says, which is probably the only answer he _could_ give that wouldn't result in Ward attempting to throw him out.

At least neither of them knows what the hell they're doing.

*

In Ward's apartment, Danny putters around while Ward, at Danny's insistence, takes a shower. He does it sitting down in the shower, because he's not wrong about both the pain of the hot water on his scalp wound and the effect of sudden heat on his blood pressure in his current collapse-prone state, but at least nobody's ever going to know. He sits on the floor of the marble shower enclosure and flinches when the water hits his skin, and sees flames when he closes his eyes, sees his dad going off the roof when his eyes are open. He catches himself wondering if he's losing his mind.

And then he thinks, _No, you already did that._ And somehow that helps, kind of. At least he can get up off the floor. It's water dripping off his hands, not blood, and that's something too.

He drinks two glasses of water at the sink and the thought occurs to him that he can't even remember doing _that_ lately. In the mirror, he looks gaunt, but ... alive. Which is more than Harold can say.

"I'm alive," he says quietly to his reflection, with the water running in the sink to mask his voice just in case (by some unlikely off chance) Danny is still out there. "And you're dead. And you're not coming back this time, you son of a bitch."

He finds clean, folded casual clothes outside the door, and isn't sure whether it's worth getting annoyed about Danny raiding his closet when it means he doesn't have to make even the most cursory decision right now. Dressed, feeling dazed, he wanders into the living room to find Danny removing items from plastic takeout bags. 

"I was going to cook something," Danny says, glancing up, "but all that's in your fridge is half a loaf of stale bread and what I now know is an endive because I googled it on my phone."

"I'm not home much." Ward sits down carefully on the couch. He feels ... not precisely _bad_ ... but more like fragile, as if his head is the wrong size and he has to carry his body carefully to make sure it doesn't fall off.

"I wasn't sure what you'd want, so I got some different stuff."

"I don't really care." He's starting to acknowledge that he is going to have to eat, even if he doesn't want to, because that's what you do. You eat, you go through all the motions of living ... and eventually, you live.

_I'm alive. You're dead._

"Soup?" Danny says, and Ward realizes, slowly, that he doesn't remember Danny crossing the room, and it might not be the first time Danny's asked.

"Yeah, okay," he says, trying not to meet Danny's eyes, because he doesn't want to see any of the possible emotions that might be there: scorn, pity, nothing at all. It's Schrödinger's emotion and as long as he doesn't see it, it is everything and nothing, and so it doesn't matter.

Danny puts the bowl in front of him, along with a spoon and napkin. Ward glances at the window, at the sunlight streaming through. It feels like it should be night. Hard to believe it's still the same day his dad was committed to the flames.

"Don't you have places to be?" he asks.

"I'm going over to the dojo, but Colleen's not expecting me 'til later."

Colleen Wing. Another person who probably doesn't want to see him. Though they did fight his undead dad together. That has to count for something.

"I'm not staying," Danny says suddenly. "To run the company with you, I mean." He's back at the kitchen island, fussing around with transferring food from takeout boxes onto a plate and not looking at Ward. "I have things that I need to do. You know? I have to go back to K'un Lun. And I have to deal with the Hand."

"You got stuff," Ward says. He picks up the spoon. "I get that."

"It's not because I don't appreciate ... you know. Your offer."

"It's still your company. 51% of it, anyway." The soup is hot and salty. It stings his mouth but it makes him realize he actually is hungry, after all. "I'm not going to try to take it away."

"I know," is all Danny says.

Ward expects him to eat in the kitchen, but to his surprise, Danny brings his plate over and sits on the other end of the couch, one leg tucked up to balance the plate on his knee while he scoops food up with chopsticks. And that triggers a sudden memory, because Danny used to sit that way when they were kids, all those years ago. One leg tucked up, using his knee for a table when he was occupied with a GameBoy or unwrapping a candy bar or whatever he was doing. For the first time in years, Ward remembers the way Danny used to twist his body around like a pretzel, and Mrs. Rand would tell him to straighten up or he'd grow that way. It's like looking backwards through time.

Ward realizes that he's paused with the spoon hovering above the bowl. 

"What?" Danny says.

"Nothing," Ward says, and he reaches for the napkin, but he thinks this might be the first time that it's hit him, really truly hit him, that this is _Danny,_ this isn't just a shaggy-haired stranger who showed up one day demanding half the company. It's a similar gut-punch to the one he got when Danny walked into the penthouse to save Ward's family (he doesn't fool himself that Danny was there for him, not really -- but Danny was there for Joy, and that's what counts): the same feeling of things rearranging and going back together in different ways. Except that time, it was the realization that he couldn't walk away, that he couldn't let Harold get away with doing that to Danny when Danny was willing to do _that_ for them, and this time ...

This time, it's like he can finally see that towheaded, girlishly pretty little boy mapped onto the adult Danny. That little kid who used to follow him around, ask for his advice, turn to Ward when he was hurt; who just goddamn kept coming _back_ no matter how many times Ward tried to shake him off, drove him away ...

_I looked up to you ..._ Danny said to him, weeks ago.

"Dude, you're staring at me," Danny is saying now.

"You're staring at me," Ward retorts, which is the _actual worst comeback_ , and he doesn't realize until the words are out of his mouth that it's exactly what he would have said to Joy if she was pestering him, back when they were kids.

Danny snorts a laugh.

And Ward catches himself grinning as he ducks his head away and picks up his spoon.


End file.
